so i wore a shirt that said "Howard" with a big X over it to a largely black neighborhod yesterday. that was fun. i was helping my future roommate move out of his place and i noticed all the neighbors were looking at us. adam (the future roommate) lives in columbia heights in d.c., which i don't think is a bad neighborhood, but it's less than safe, i guess you could say. adam says it's "the ghetto," but i think he may be exaggerating a bit. i guess he would know though, since he lives there, and he takes cabs home at night and stuff because he doesn't want to walk. so all the neighbors were staring at us move, and we didn't really know why, and i was getting a little nervous, as it seemed like more than just curiosity since nobody was talking or doing anything else besides staring. then we walked to wendy's to get some dinner and everybody along the way was staring too. "that's odd," i thought. i didn't think it would be that abnormal for there to be some skinny white dudes in a largely minority area. so when we got into the wendy's and we were standing in line, i noticed a black guy in front of me staring at my shirt, and i realized i was wearing a "No Howard" shirt, like with a big red X over "Howard," as in the historically black college in d.c.. i have this shirt because at gw basketball games they throw out shirts to the student section, and the shirts all have an X over the opposing school's name, like UMass or whatever, and i guess i was wearing this as my undershirt at work. it's actually pretty funny: i got hot, took off my work shirt, visited columbia heights for the first and probably only time, and just happened to be wearing the one of the probably 100 t-shirts i have, and the one out of 10 i have with X's over school names, that would be offensive to most of the people there. doh.

so what I think is funny is when people add "-ology" to something to make it sound like a serious occupation. "mixology" is a good example, the "science" of making drinks. I mean, making drinks is definitely a skill, but I think it hardly qualifies as a science. I don't think there are too many graduate programs in mixology around, and it's not as if mixologists are discovering important new things. "The Nobel Prize goes to Chad Roccogrande from Big Ed's in Paramus, New Jersey for his discovery of how to mix Kahlua and schnapps." I play video games a lot, am I a videogamologist? The same thing goes for ufology, the study of UFOs. People definitely study that, but once again, not a science. and even if it is a science, i think they need a new name for it, since I think most sciences aren't just a word plus "-ology". It's called geology, not rockology.

so I got this junk email today with the subject "Make money in your underwear!" I assume this means that if you do whatever it is they are selling, you can make so much money at home that you won't even need to get dressed and you can sit around being lazy and getting rich. however, when i first saw it i thought that if you buy whatever they are selling, you can create dollar bills inside your underpants. or small change. this kind of worries me, as firstly i don't want to use counterfeit money, since i might get caught, and secondly, i don't want to handle money that was on someone's balls. or even worse areas, since either it would stink or i'd catch something. i mean, i would guess you'd do this while you're wearing them, since otherwise the underwear wouldn't really stand up, unless they were really dirty or frozen. and i assume this money would be counterfeit, as i've been to the mint and seen the big machines they use to make the money, and i don't remember seeing any people running around in underwear, unless maybe they were in a vault so no one kidnaps them. kind of like in "minority report," they are special mutant people who have a high tolerance for dying their privates. dying as in using dye, not as in killing, since i would assume most people have no tolerance for that. or then again, maybe this email is an ad for underwear modeling. in which case i think a better subject for the email would be "you are so attractive you ought to be an underwear model", since that sucks up to whoever is reading the email. and thank you, i have considered that in the past, but no one has approached me about it until now.

so call me immature, but i this map makes me laugh. check out the three street names just south of the red star. it could only be funnier if there were a "weiner blvd"